You’re fooling yourself, provided you’re a tipped worker making the tipped minimum. Every possible study on the subject shows this isn’t the case. And a worker in your position in a country without tipping probably makes more than you or at least enjoys a higher standard of living.
There are exceptions. And I am one of them. I live in a wealthy area. Mostly work in higher end independent places. As a bartender I am a skilled worker who typically gets paid higher than the tipped minimum. I am also a white straight dude. So few people are grabbing my ass, and noone’s shorting me based on the color of my skin.
And even I can see where I’m getting screwed. You know those months you worry about making rent because business is slow? Or the sick time and benefits you’'re not eligible for? Among other things? All a result of the tipping system we now have. Tipped workers are denied the basic labor rights we extend to everyone else. And the reason is OMG look at how much money they make from tips!
It would be irresponsible for me to base my opinion on tipping on the opinion of a single individual who receives tips and likes the arrangement. There’s a strong possibility that it is working well for you at the expense of the vast majority of servers, in which case it seems like it would be unfair to cater to your preferences rather than advocating for a policy that does the most social good.
Therefore, anyone who is convinced by your comment that tips are good probably shouldn’t be convinced. If you want to convince people to be for tips, you need to make a better case than: “They benefit me personally.”
N’est-ce pas?
Edit: This is similar to the big box electronics story above by @onemanmob. The tipping policy may be good for certain people with certain personalities – people who may not be particularly good servers, but are perhaps more attractive and charismatic than the median server and therefore make more in tips regardless of their acumen as a server – just as a particularly pushy, confrontational salesman might be much less helpful to customers, but much better at selling useless warranties.
So suppose I employ a single mother at some poor wage, let’s say $10 an hour, and she can’t make ends meet, because she has two kids and various related expenses. But along comes a potential replacement employee, someone young and single who lives with their parents, who can definitely get by even on the $9.50 they’re asking, because they have no major financial responsibilities. According to your formulation, I should fire the former and hire the latter, because I’m stealing from her, but would no longer be stealing from this new employee.
More generally, in case you can’t see where I’m going with this: taking care of poor people who can’t make ends meet is a society-wide obligation. Maybe you could call it a public good. Expecting employers to set wages according to their employees’ needs is neither reasonable nor a good idea.
In the US you never see the true price for anything until you come to pay for it. Foreigners hate how all your advertised prices are pre-tax and we have no clue how much anything is going to set us back until the cashier tells us
I used to work at a restaurant in a college town as a cook, and occasionally if they needed me, a waitstaffer. I have many stories about the inequities I saw there. Once, a huge group came in and I got pressed into service helping run out food because everyone was so busy. The diners left a $5 tip for me and one other person who helped out, in addition to what they left for the regular waiter. The regular guy went ballistic on us and demanded we give him our tips because he was the primary server. At the time I thought he was just an asshole, but it might have been that he needed to make a car payment or rent money, and the extra $5 meant the difference between gas and no gas for his car.
Regarding slack seasons and boom times, one night shortly before Christmas the manager came in and asked for volunteers to work a ‘short shift’ the day before Christmas Eve at a neighboring restaurant. I was one of 2 people who agreed. We were there from 5 in the afternoon to nearly midnight, because everyone else had called off and there were only 3 of us to do all the closedown work in addition to cooking and waiting tables. Tipping was, if anything, worse that night than usual; I only broke even that night because I was getting paid as a cook, not a server, and the tips I got were extra.
You seem not to understand the dilemma. Let’s make it even clearer: instead of already employing the single mother in the example, I’m in the position of choosing one of two new employees, the single mother and the stay-at-home youngster. According to you, so long as I hire the latter, i.e. so long as I can find an employee who apparently can ‘make ends meet’ on whatever wage it is they are asking, I’m morally in the clear. But if I hire someone who is either not making ends meet, even if they want the job at the wage I offer, or is relying on social services, I am now stealing from them (or perhaps society; apparently there is more than one claim of malfeasance in play here).
A related thought experiment: I’m in favor of a universal basic income. One probable effect of such a program would be that a rather large number of people would engage in interesting, but low-paid work, relying on the UBI to make up the difference. Would all these employers in such a scenario be ‘getting subsidies’? If they were, would it be a bad thing? Would it be better if they all disappeared?
Well in my defense, I think my wife did a lot more of the work than the doctor. I didn’t cut her a check that day, but she’s had me at her beck and call for the last twelve years so I think it’s working in her favor.
and note I realize not all deliveries are as text book as my wife’s, so YMMV
I disagree. If you want to hire someone to do work for you then you have an obligation to compensate them in a fair and just manner. Taking advantage of someone due to their age or situation is neither moral or just.
“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”
“By living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level — I mean the wages of a decent living.” ( F.D.R 1933, Statements on National Industrial Recovery Act)
That’s is correct. If you rely on offering less than what the average person needs in order to make a decent living, you have no moral right to employ people.
The major issue I have with social things like UBI is the scales of economy don’t always work for a specific country. It sounds like a great idea, but where is that money coming from? Realistically it is coming from taxes, but you can’t be taxing the average or below citizen at a high enough rate to compensate for the level of redistribution needed to make the numbers work for something like a high wage UBI. So that leaves the upper income citizens and businesses (along with taxes on other sources of revenue). Obviously taxing high income individuals would help but I don’t think it’s enough to compensate for the level of “subsidized” workers. ie, if you want the minimum to be $40k/yr that’s a lot of room to make up if a majority of workers are not making that now. (And here you now get into a grey area of cost of living vs. some level of minimum income. Because where I live $40k/yr for a single person is doable, but in a major city not going to work.) So that leaves taxing businesses. That works for some countries, especially when they setup laws that companies want to exploit (like tax havens…where a small percentage of tax yields a very large income for a tiny nation) - but a country like the US? I can’t see how it would work with our level of industries. Multinationals have little to no loyalty and will move or do what is needed to minimize taxation, and the mid sized and smaller companies now just have added pressure to be “taxed” for the sake of society.
I think a lot of social programs are great in theory but I fail to see how they are economically viable without stunting some other sector of the economy or at potentially hurting the development of a country.
My individualized way of rebelling against tipping is leaving large tips for bad service. I always leave a reasonable tip, but if service was really noticeably bad then I tip extra to compensate since probably if I got bad service other people did too.
Such a great post. This is a really interesting debate and, coming from a country that doesn’t tip like the US, I’d love to see a proper living wage implemented to make hospitality jobs fair for all those who want to turn it into a real profession. Having worked in restaurants in the US, though, I know how rough it can be to rely on tips to pay your rent. It’s a risky game.
Here’s another interesting article that explains both the ant- and pro-tipping arguments. https://www.bevspot.com/2016/02/17/the-anti-tipping-movement-and-what-it-means-for-your-bar/
My standard tip is pretty much the same as @CarlMud. 20%ish across the board for dining in, and that is of the total bill not any “no tipping on alcohol, or tax” crap. The service would have to be really really bad for me to tip less. Everyone has a bad day and I don’t want to fuck someone over for it, especially if the kitchen screwed up. Like the time I found a metal twisty tie baked into my pizza after biting into it. The waitress was PISSED! We had our food comped, but still tipped on what would have been the total bill.
To justify moral claims like this, you either have to qualify:
-“you have no moral right [under moral code X]”
or you have to make an explicit case:
-“you have no moral right [because it has effect Y]”
(The former is preferable, because the latter still assumes that your interlocutor shares enough of your moral values to find Y immoral.)
I think the idea that you have to pay a living wage to be able to hire anyone at all is stupid because I support small business and this is the kind of policy that makes it impossible for people to become successful by starting and growing their own businesses. Minimum wage laws seem to me to support mostly large businesses who “weather the storm” better than small businesses can when minimum wages are suddenly implemented or increased.
But that aside, I think the way you’ve put this leaves your moral assertion vulnerable to @borisbartlog’s argument, but with the scales changed slightly.
That is, if businesses are forced to pay based on the needs of the average person, that still leaves about 50% of people with greater-than-average needs who will necessarily rely on social services to supplement their wages if they have minimum wage jobs.
It’s not clear to me why it’s immoral for minimum wage to be so low that only 49% of people can live off it, or why it would suddenly become moral if 51% of people can live off it.
Another important detail is that cost of living is not uniformly distributed, so basing a national minimum wage on what the “average person” needs would destroy businesses in depressed areas (who cannot afford to pay such high wages relative to local cost of living) and very low wages for min wage workers in places with high costs of living.
No particular moral right to employ people is being claimed. By which I mean that so long as you can make a reasonable case that someone, or everyone, is better off as a result of a particular employment situation being proscribed, I will at least for the sake of the current argument agree that it should be disallowed. The problem is that there apparently exists a large class of jobs such that
A) the employees are indeed being paid poorly
B) nonetheless we infer from the fact that they continue to work that they have no better options
C) mandating a major increase in the compensation will result in the job being abolished
Examples might include grocery baggers, greeters, some subset of landscaping workers, and so on. Indeed if I take some of your statements at face value, even hiring a teenager to mow my lawn for anything less than a decent adult wage is ‘taking advantage of someone due to their age or situation’.
Anyway, I don’t see how any of these people are better off in this situation. They lost their shitty jobs, but now they have no jobs. Maybe some other people (in less readily abolished jobs) are being paid more, but over the broad category of low-paid workers, the effect is regressive: the least able are the ones who lose out. I may not be able to claim a moral right to employ anyone, but it certainly looks like I can make a strong case that for some of these jobs, there is no one who is worse off as a result of the low-paid job existing.
No. I don’t actually. But, let’s play along. Article 23 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (to which we are a signatory as a nation) reads, in part “Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity”
So there is the morality code upon which I’ll hang my hat.
Well, one can always rebut that you are contributing to a “race to the bottom” and doing that is immoral, but I essentially agree that it is better to have the job on offer than no job on offer. As you say, desperate people don’t magically become not desperate if you don’t offer them any jobs at all.
Well, you don’t in the sense that you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.
I had implied the following; perhaps I should have stated it explicitly:
[If you want any credibility whatsoever, and if you want to have any chance whatsoever of convincing anyone who doesn’t already agree with you, then] To justify moral claims like this,
Why should I care what the UN says about morality or human rights (especially given their sub-stellar track record on such things)? Why should I put any stock in rights-based conceptions of morality?
This is more of a legalistic argument than a moral one – you are saying something is immoral because our government signed something that says so; but usually I do not consider legalism to be a good justification for moral judgments. For example, I do not believe that marijuana possession or use is immoral merely because it is illegal, and in this case I find the illegality of these things itself immoral.
This is an assertion; it is not self-justifying. Perhaps if you could adequately establish that a rights-based approach to morality is correct, or if you could establish moral authority for the UN (good luck with that), then I could see some justification for simply taking this at face value – but you have not done those things.
Even if you could establish the correctness of a rights-based approach to morality, that would not establish that this itself is a morally justifiable right of all human beings – you would have to make a case on the merits. For example, I can assert: “Everyone who works has the right to live in a palace carved of marble and not less than 30,000 sq feet”, but it’s not clear why such a moral statement would actually be true. Similarly with yours. It certainly sounds nice, but it has a few problems:
-What counts as “work”? Who decides?
-What counts as “just and favourable remuneration”? Does it depend on the nature of the work, or is there an absolute minimum? Who decides?
-A two-wage family of four and a one-wage family of four presumably need similar amounts of “remuneration” to have “an existence worthy of human dignity”. Does this mean you can pay a person half as much if their spouse also works?
-What is “an existence worthy of human dignity” anyway? Car/house/TV? Small apartment, cheap clothes, biscuits, and lard? Who decides?
-Nothing in this article claims that it is the employer who is morally obligated to provide the living wage. Why should we think the employer is on the hook for providing “an existence worthy of human dignity” assuming we can figure out what the hell that means in the first place?
Your moral beliefs are not obviously correct, and the only way you will ever convince anyone who disagrees with you is by recognizing and addressing where your moral beliefs differ from those you are trying to convince.
